Craig, not willing to get into the Macports discussion for a third time, we've discussed it, enough said. But you have and continue to do great work and are a huge help to Mac users here. I for one will always applaud all of the very hard work you have done and continue to do.

Regarding Mac OSX, you have stated several times there is a big problem there with lack of developer and focus on the issues affecting osx. Those were your words. You said Mac issues have been put to the background and they are not willing to put much effort into them unless someone can find very specific issues and solutions. Your words. You of course said a Mac developer was needed.

I did come forward, and did have the experience needed, via multiple channels, including you. No one ever got back to me. I feel you do not believe I have (most of) the needed skills, and that's fine. I could have provided a resume, and with a 5 minute discussion, I think it would have worked out. That saddens me as a long time Mac person and I really love the mythtv software! And tells me that while I know you believe Mac is important to mythtv, that apparently it may not actually be at present. More than likely, the problem is indeed they have no one with sufficient Mac skills, and yes, they do often go elsewhere! I do believe that to be the case, and I doubt they wouldn't desire to have better OSX support. I did not say that, of course they did else they wouldn't use such open source tools. But it's just not there at this time. I had wished it were there and that it ran better on the platform. It had too many bugs and problems for me to use, and, no releases of later versions where bugs were fixed. The Linux version is much much better at this time.

I hope you continue on your quest to make mythtv better for Mac users. I am and will always be a Mac user and volunteer developer. I'll be working on another project for the rest of June, and then hopefully back to some more travel and I need to get that import recorder working (fixed after mythtv 29) now that I am back from Spain. It's a nice feature and I have several uses for it.

As I think I suggested before, the best way to get started contributing to Myth is to submit a patch that fix a problem (or 12). Or submit a new ticket with a clean patch adding a useful new feature. Follow up with the developer team on IRC. Don't expect them to chase you--all of them have a personal todo list longer than your arm. Naturally, they'd love to have help clearing something off their todo's rather adding another task.

TBH, new contributors need to listen to the existing team. Collectively, they have decades of experience with Myth. A couple of times, over the last few years, a new contributor has shown up. Soon, they've started yelling "This is all shite! You're all idiots if you don't agree that we've got to blow everything up and do it MY WAY." Unsurprisingly, that doesn't go over well. It is a team effort and new folks need to make a little effort to fit into the team.

There is a very small group of active developers, currently. Check the recent commits:

In the future, I may well submit patches, but probably only for things that affect me as my time is elsewhere now. However, I absolutely hate it when developers join a project and know everything and make claims it's done wrong, etc. Code should be done to the standards and style of the existing code unless told otherwise, no doubt. And even if you are the best coder on a given team or have the most experience on other projects but are the new guy, you lack the vision of the others and certainly do not understand the overall design, etc. You are spot on there!

FYI: I've had some time off this week, so have been able to dig into this a bit further.

Sfatula - many thanks for sending over your build scripts - much appreciated, and I learnt a lot about the build process from going through it. With only a little modification, I was able to get them successfully building on macOS 10.12.6 / MythTV 29.1 / Qt5.8. Whilst it then looked like things would all be happy, I then got entangled with MySQL/DBI/DBD - which I didn't manage to find my way out of. From memory, I was trying Homebrew to install them, and DBD was having issues. In retrospect, I could have tried MacPorts to install - but I didn't think about that at the time.

Consequently I turned my attention to the MacPorts build, to see if I could hack that to build MythTV 29.1 - and I've managed it (macOS 10.12.6 / MythTV 29.1 / Qt 5.10). So far, it looks like Myth is working as expected - though I haven't exhaustively tested it, as I'll primarily be using the backend.

Craig - I'm working on a Github pull request for the Myth.28 and MythWeb.28 ports. There are a few points I need to tidy up first, but I'll try and get it done before I forget it all.

So thanks Sfatula and Craig for your work in getting me as far as you did with MythTV running on Mac - very much appreciated!

For the last 4-5 weeks, I've been back to plugging away at MythTV 29.x on macOS. Starting with MoisiePants pull request, I got the code to build successfully. So I resurrected my Parallels VM's for testing. Unfortunately, mythfrontend would crash hard at launch each and every time. I thought it might be a bug in the Parallels virtual environment (or just that it gets an odd-size screen). So I borrowed my wife's little-used MacBook Pro (late 2011). After a few small adventures setting up the build environment, it built successfully there too. mythfrontend did not _crash_ on launch--but only the top-left quarter of the screen was being properly displayed.

With help from the crew on IRC yesterday, we tracked down that I needed to go into mythfrontend>Settings>Appearance>Theme/Screen Settings>GUI Dimensions and change the width and height of the screen from 0 (which means auto-detect) to the actual values (1280 X 800). Note that this would be virtually impossible to do if only 1/4 of the screen was being displayed. By happenstance, I found that I could get the full screen to display if I fed the commandline with '--override-theme=default'. This actually should not work--"default" is not a full-fledged theme; it is just a series of resources that other themes use if they haven't included a particular resource for themselves. But it did work and the 1280 X 800 workaround also got the full screen to display. (Well except for the Mac menu bar which should have been hidden.)

This is bad. If a normal user runs into this, the workaround is pretty involved and highly error-prone. We still don't have a Mac-based developer so there is no one obvious to dig into this and figure what is going wrong and how to fix it.

Plus the usability problem remains with Myth that I experienced over a year ago. Now it manifests every time I start mythfrontend--every key press results in a beep but no action on the screen. The main menu of mythfrontend is displayed but you can't move to another menu choice or activate it. That is, UNTIL you click the mouse somewhere on the screen. mythfrontend will then have "focus" and everything works normally until you get to certain other screens. In my limited testing so far, entering any one of several screen in the Settings area will cause mfe to again lose focus until one clicks the mouse.

What's the big deal, you say, it's just a mouse click?!? Myth has always been designed to be driven by a remote control. A mouse should never be necessary. My 'production' Myth box is connected to my home theatre setup and I don't normally use a keyboard or mouse with it. Only a remote control. I would have to find some way to click the d@mm screen every time it loses focus.

Yet another technical concern. Myth relies on the Qt libraries for huge amounts of functionality including everything to do with the user interface. Qt is/was designed to be cross platform so that made Mac (and Windows) ports a possibility. Recently, there have been a spate of Qt releases which are dropping support for older macOS/OSX versions. For example, I believe the latest Qt5.12 is only supported on 10.13 and 10.14. Qt5.11 is supported on 10.11 through 10.14. Qt5.9 is supported on 10.10 through 10.12. In response to this, MacPorts has developed a complicated system where it generally installs the newest Qt5 version that your OS supports.

The upshot is that a multiple new all-in-one installers would have to be created to get the right version of Qt5 for our various OS versions. Once created, you can be sure that people will use the wrong version thus complicating support. I don't have the time available for that.

Bottom line, Myth 29 on macOS is unlikely to happen. When I get some time again, I may play with the now-newly-release MythTV 30 but I don't expect that any of these problems have magically gone away.